3⁄4" Cuban Mahogany II

Well Gregor sanded the slab of reclaimed wood that I bought recently at Steptoe's Yard in Montrose. What we both thought was weathered Cuban Mahogany turned out to be Teak. Well done to Gregor for his professional identification. Teak is even harder than Mahogany. There are Janka Hardness charts for various species of wood on the Internet.

Gregor cut this up to construct two new "meal shelves" which were once a feature of the bedroom corridors at Balintore Castle for the servants to use for holding trays.

As the reclaimed material is not the same wood type as the original mahogany, we thought it best to recreate a pair of missing shelves from scratch rather than repair existing shelves.

sanded and cut-up teak

And in fact, to get a pair of shelves out of the one slab, we had to make them 18" wide instead of the original 20". I don't think anyone is going to notice.  :-)  I sumggested cutting the shelves out across the grain instead of with the grain to get the the right size, but Gregor said they could split and we should honour the grain orientation of the original shelves.

Gregor could not locate a router bit in his case to match the original moulding of the shelve edges, and was starting to fret a little. However, he had one bit that was the right shape but just a tadge smaller in scale. I convinced him this was good enough - it certainly was to my eye. Sometimes when perfection is not achieveable, it just needs someone with a more objective outlook to say "good enough" to the person trying to solve the problem.

Gregor's router bits

The routered shelving looks great. :-) Aside from the shelf proper, there is also a section of wood that is attached to the wall, and a small section of shelf 2" deep to which the large main shelf is hinged. The depth of the main shelf was unknown as there are none left, but I remarked to Gregor that my eye and sense of proportion said they should be 12". Gregor was hovering at 10", and I suggested we could try looking at the original plans.

routered teak

Anyhow, I looked at the original plans this evening, and found this.

meal shelves described in the original plans

By a miracle, my guess at the shelf depth was spot on: 2" on one side of the hinge and 12" deep on the other making the 14" mentioned in the plans. Channel that building hurrahs! :-)

In my researches on hardwood, I learned a new word chatoyance. This is the way hardwoods change in colour with the incident angle of light, so you get a ripple effect that moves on the surface as you move your relative position. This gives a 3D effect with two vantage points i.e. one from each eye. Need I mention that chatoyance is desirable? The derivation makes one feel dumb for not spotting it. Chatoyance = chat + oeil + ance = cat + eye + ance as in the mineral cat's eye which exhibits the same phenomenon from the world of physics.  :-)